SEO Avalanche Technique - Ranking With No Resources

[CCarter]

An Ancient named BoFu taught me this technique eons ago, It's pretty much how to get started off when you have zero resources, no outreach, no backlink budget, no connections, no secret SEP (search engine pray) sauce, nada.

For some of you older ancients you'll sense part of the Blue Hat SEO technique within it (they screwed up that site - damn use archive.org and use the 2011 year for a majority of the content), yes it's got the same death by a thousand cuts from one of the ancient scrolls - and part of the basement technique of the SEO Empire post (linking upwards) - also note this is the original "SEO skyscraper technique" borrowed by a friend of the Resistance in later years.

If you understand carefully how this works you'll be able to defeat any algorithm on ANY system in the world.

The theory is why DDOS can take out any site. It's how termites eat away a house. It's how anyone can move a mountain. Basically death by a thousand cuts.

A DDOS starts with one ping to a site, then another, then another, then concurrent pings from different sources, and the pings don't stop, they keep coming and coming until eventually the server cannot keep up and then collapse.

Same with termites. One starts eating the wood of the house, then another, then another, they bring their buddies, and for days, weeks, months, and years they are sitting underneath the floor boards eating away until one day collapse.

How do you move a mountain with no resources? One spoonful at a time. Hopefully a shovel at a time at bare minimum.

Eventually the goal is to get to a point where you can then buy resources to accelerate the tasks.

In the beginning it was all about keywords' traffic - if you have no resources you find terms you can rank for without backlinks or promotion and drop a piece of content and hopefully you get in the top 10. Basically going after low-hanging fruit.

If there were 100 visitors a day for that term and you got in the top 10 you'll get 1-10 visitors at best. Remember this was back in 2007-2009 easy days before all the fancy Google feature snippets started taking clicks away from the top 10.

Now it's Top 3 - no problem.

There is a reason I ask users what amount of traffic Google is sending them daily through organic means. That's the tier they can play with.

Here is a simplified version of the daily Google organic traffic tiers:

Tier	Traffic (daily / month)
Level 0	0 - 10
Level 10	10 - 20
Level 20	20 - 50
Level 50	50 - 100
Level 100	100 - 200
Level 200	200 - 500
Level 500	500 - 1000
Level 1,000	1,000 - 1,500
Level 1,500	1,500 - 2,000
Level 2,000	2,000 - 3,000
Level 3,000	3,000 - 4,000
Level 4,000	4,000 - 5,000
Level 5,000	5,000 - 7,500
Level 7,500	7,500 - 10,000
Level 10,000	10,000 - 12,500
Level 12,500	12,500 - 15,000
Level 15,000	15,000 - 25,000
Level 25,000	25,000 - 50,000

These levels are all subject to interpretation. Before Obi-Wan BoFu disappeared into the ether he didn't exactly give me a full blueprint of the steps so there was a lot of trial and error.

This simplified version is generally how I create an SEO game plan. I find the current site's tier, and build down the basement levels as I'm building upward.

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These tier levels are basically where Google trusts your site to be within. You have to master the level you are at first before jumping tiers.

This is also why when a site tanks, Google never stops completely sending you traffic, it just resets you to the bare minimum tier and you get trickles of cheddar in. Work within that tier until you naturally overflow into the next.

Explaining "Power Boosts"

If Google skips you ahead they are giving you extra juice, that extra juice CAN be taken away. Whether the juice is from the backlink power, domain authority, domain age, social signals, Google Trust factor, Google PageRank, Your Pagespeed score, Google Quality Rater team, On-Page SEO, or Voodoo magic - consider it a "power boost".

Boost don't necessarily last forever - you have to know you are on a boost and that boost can be taken away.

Your non-boost power is what you are dropped back down to if you get slapped by Google.

Boosts like backlinks and pagespeed can degrade overtime - examples you add a new script to your domain site-wide or someone adds another link to a page you have a backlink from. Assume degradation factors are involved within every algorithm - even twitter.

Get Started

So to find out where you are look at your daily Google organic traffic. Look at the bottom (weekends) and tops (highest volume days) - get the range and the average.

Let's use simple maths, let's say on a good day in the last 3 months you get 100 visitors a day, on a bad day, Saturday you get 20.

The range is therefore 20-100. Doing the numbers the average is 75 visitors a day for the last 3 months, you know you are in the 50-100 range.

Google trusts your domain enough to send it 20-100 visitors a day - that's your power.

Think about it logically now - If you throw up an article targeting a term that's 30,000 visitors a day are you likely to rank based on your minimum power?

No.

The ONLY way Google will get you in the the top 3 for that 30,000 term is if you have significant amount of power boosts - links and anchors STILL being the most important factor. But if you have no resources to buy, or do not know how to solicit, nor have zero skills in creating content that will go viral by itself you are pretty much out of luck right?

Here is the other thing though - If you lose those links you'll be slapped back down to your 20-100 visitors a day, where you belong. That is what happens when pages get penalized or links get devalued.

The key is to play within the tiers you are apart of until you naturally rise if you have no power boosts available.

Remember in South Park when the kids were playing World of Warcraft and had to go to the forest to kill those boars and small creatures to slowly incrementally gain enough power cause that one boss guy was killing everyone?

Well that's how you defeat any algorithm or system, by being an outlier. Basically starting from the bottom of the barrel, bottom of the sea.

So the game that was taught to me by BoFu was to do keyword research within your tiers for search volume and create content that targeted the tier MONTHLY.

This is the most critical part - The tiers you are targeting are based off of your daily Google organic traffic but you need to use that number for the MONTHLY visitors for the keywords.

What?

In our example we are getting 50-100 visitors a day. Someone pretending to be smart will say "Well that means we can go after 3000 visitors a month traffic".

WRONG.

Since you are trying to defeat the algorithm as an outlier, if you are getting 50-100 visitors a day you need to target keywords that get 50-100 visitors a MONTH.

Again think about it logically, If ranking for that 3,000 visitors a month term was possible Google would essentially double the amount of traffic to you in a single month off a single article (without a power boost)?

No.

That's why when people skip tiers when they drop cause their power boost was taken away they drop dramatically due to them not building the proper moat by tiering their organic traffic.

Determining Your Natural Tier

How to determine your true tier is by publishing an article and seeing whether you land in the top 10 for the main term naturally. If you target a 100 monthly search term and land in the top 10 that's your tier. IF you CANNOT land in the top 10, then that's not your natural non-power boosted tier.

Try a term that gets 20-50 visitors a month. IF you land in the top 10 for that then you've found your tier.

If you try a 0-10 monthly KGR search term and cannot land in the top 10 - you've got a serious problem with your site.

Now obviously you can power-boost your pages with on-page, backlinks, interlinking, and all that fun stuff, but we are going off the premises you are lazy and/or have no resources for all that.

Something to think about - if you are ranking without backlinks and no power-boosts for these low level terms how can Google take them away? They can't without killing your whole domain - a manual penalty.​

Now if you are smart you have money pages that you are interlinking this bottom content to that are naturally rising as you create these low level pages. You'll start noticing those money pages are rising "naturally" as you add more and more bricks to the bottom of your pyramid.

Game Plan using KGR (Keyword Golden Ratio) Technique:

1. Determine where you are within the Google organic tiers - in our example we are going to use 20-50 organic visitors daily.

2. Do keyword research and find terms that generate 0-10, 10-20, and 20-50 visitors a MONTH (NOT DAILY). Find 30-45 of them.

Use the Keyword Golden Ratio technique for the terms (AND do normal keyword research for the same search volumes to use within the content). I personally go to Fiverr and find providers that do the research for me within 24-36 hours. So for $5-50 days you can get a Fiverr give to generate you up-to 250 terms that have a KGR of 0.25 and under.

FYI Using the KGR technique is relatively new to me HOWEVER the growth has been exponential after months of creating content, so it's the go-to now for my SEO operation instead of just "low-hanging fruit" methods. I'm writing this with the KGR method as the primary but years before we didn't use intitle but simple double quotes for terms. KGR is a huge improvement.​

3. Order OR write the content yourself, for those terms. Make sure to use the research keyword researched terms, non-KGR, within the content so you can - get this - anchor link upward to your money terms and other important pages! Interlinking seems to be a lost art, but it's how news websites are ranking in the SERPs

4. Publish one each day for 30 days. Make sure to interlink the new content to your money pages AND previously published Avalanche pages (BlueHat SEO - linking upwards). Basically you are adding new basements to the bottom of your pyramid by constantly connecting to previous Avalanche pages - Basement SEO - cause you know you started in your mom's basement...

This way you also don't need to go back and interlink older Avalanche pages unless they become really good at generating traffic and need to be used to enhance money pages or categories, tags, or other aspect of your site.

5. Before you publish a new article throw keywords into a SERP tracker (or regular rank tracker) along with your domain. This way the second your article is found within Google you'll know exactly where it appeared. Using a SERP tracker also has the benefit of being able see other pages ranking - their metrics, domain pages, social signals, etc, within the top 30 or 100 results when your domain does appear.

You'll start getting a sense of your true natural tier you have without power boosts. Use ANY rank tracker, you want, but it's important to measure your content so you know where you land in the SERPs.

If none of your pages enter the top 10 for the 30-45 terms upon immediately publishing YOU GOT PROBLEMS. There is no way that if you used the KGR technique that you cannot land within the top 10 for one out of 30-45 terms. Something is really wrong with your website, technique, or brain.

Go fill out an application at McDonalds at this point and give up your SEO career, this isn't for you.

6. After 1 month you should start seeing an increase in traffic - regardless of age of site cause you used the KGR technique.

If your average organic traffic goes above your current tier (over 100 in our example) you can start adding in the next tier HOWEVER keep KGR and keywords that are in the below tiers.

Remember you are building a moat that should stand the test of time.

So when doing KGR research - IF you leveled up in terms of average daily traffic, you go after terms that are 0-10, 10-20, 20-50, and now 50-100!

You have to stay WITHIN your tier until all the Avalanche traffic naturally pushes you out of it. Next month you should continue seeing an increase in traffic gradually as you publish content that is KGR and regular keyword rich. So get another 30-45 terms for your content calendar and repeat. Once you get to 200 visitors a day, you can go after 100-200 terms cause you were naturally pushed out.

7. Open your rank tracker and find the pages which are lower than top 10 for your KGR terms. They need link juice to get them within the top 10. Find the pages that are within the top 10 and link to pages that are NOT within the top 10. It takes, according to PageOptimizer Pro's Kyle Roof, 3 inner links to equal 1 external link. Since your Avalanche pages are KGR they won't need much interlinking to boost them up, and your natural domain power should be able to handle it.

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Organizing Projects​

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To keep things organized I organize the Avalanche terms by levels, and group the projects into my "Avalanche" Team so when I'm in the SERPWoo interface I can simply concentrate on those terms when working on this (I also share the team with writers so they can see what we are targeting and what pages need to be boosted by interlinking upward):​

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Another technique is to use social media to send traffic and blog commenting, traffic leaking, and promoting your content throughout the internet to boost up the pages. For most of the KGR stuff you won't need more than 1-5 links, low to medium power, pages to push them up.

So whenever you lookin in your Avalanche projects inside your rank tracker look for the lowest ranking pages and get links to them from a higher pages using appropriate anchors.

Now if somehow your KGR Avalanche pages can't get into the top 100 - again you'll need to go fill out a job at McDonalds, SEO isn't for you.

Also remember YOU CAN power-boost your way out with backlinks (external links going to your pages) and all that, but remember we using this technique with no power boost on purpose. Save the backlinks for money pages and important pages.

8. NOW eventually you might really run out of KGR terms under a certain traffic volume. That's okay, since you've published about 60-90 articles of content you should have some good Google organic traffic which you can leverage.

Remember Google trusts pages that it is already sending traffic to (it's why getting backlinks from previously published pages is so popular and the fastest way to the top of the search results - niche editing stuff). So you can graduate to beyond KGR and going after search terms that still have the same search volume tiers but are above the 0.25 KGR ratio, you've got some big boy pants on now.

When you drop an article you should be within the top 100, find an appropriate pages from the 30-90 and link to your newer pages from those pages. Remember to use pages that get Google traffic already.

If a page is ranking in the top 3 and gets 1 visitor a month that page is worthless and a link from that page is useless. I wouldn't delete it unless it literally zero traffic - cause that 1 visitor can convert into a sale or click.

9. After doing this Avalanche technique and exhausting the KGR ratio in 6 months to a year the amount of traffic you've gotten if you've been interlinking to your lower power pages should keep increasing and you should be hovering at 10000 visitors a month, by conservative estimates.

Here is the maths:

30 articles at 0-10 visitors tier a month =~ 300 visitors​

30 articles at 10-20 visitors tier a month =~ 600 visitors​

30 articles at 20-50 visitors tier a month =~ 1,500 visitors​

30 articles at 50-100 visitors tier a month =~ 3,000 visitors​

30 articles at 100-200 visitors tier a month =~ 6,000 visitors​

30 articles at 200-500 visitors tier a month =~ 15,000 visitors​

30 articles for 6 months = 180 articles hovering around KGR and low-hanging fruit terms.

After the first month you'll get 0-300 visitors. After 2nd month you'll get 300 + the 600 visitors from the next tier, and so on.

By month 6, if done right you are looking at an aggregated 26,400 potential visitors - if let's say only 50% of that is achieved cause of varying positions in the top 10 or other factors you are looking at 13,200 visitors, that's your moat at 6 months.

Let's say you really suck at SEO and can't get any of that and it takes you double the time that's 12 months to get to the same 13,200 visitors.

If you've successfully published 180 articles in 6 months and can't even break the 13,200 visitors a day per month mark - start filling out that McDonald's application, cause this method is the most brute force, cheapest, and one of the safest ways to build a moat.

10. The only way this fails is if after month one you didn't either check your SERP positions and re-evaluate what tier level you belong to. OR you skipped around in tiers. If you publish 30 articles and can't get ANY organic Google traffic there is something really wrong with your website or on-page SEO.

Make sure your website is rounded out with social profiles - easiest method. Make sure you got images within your content. Make sure the content is formatted correctly.

Some of the basics of SEO I assume people do - if you publish a new article tweet about it with popular hashtags and an image tweet. Here is a screenshot of 2 tweets, which one do you think has more engagement?

Using the popular hashtags allows you to show up in search results for it - Also Google indexes the hashtags, Google "#marketing" and you will see a carousel from Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms. Google then crawls pages it finds within other pages - hashtags!

Do you think Google is not going to index a page that shows up in 2-10 popular hashtags across different platforms? Indexation problem solved.

Summary

When you understand why this works it also means since you build your foundation on the backs of hundreds and thousands of terms, you've got a moat that's nearly impenetrable. Unless your main domain gets penalized Google will not strip you of the natural traffic your Avalanche technique has generated.

THIS technique is how WikiHow became a dominate force. It started off with low level articles then afterwards improved their presentation and "circled the mountain upward" to climb up it instead of scaling it from one side.

A lot of different techniques were talked about in this post the main theory comes from building traffic moats and barriers that cannot be easily taken away.

Added Bonus

P.S. Also make sure to block Ahrefs (AhrefsBot), SEMRush (SEMrushBot), Majestic (MJ12Bot) and other tools' bad bots from your site.

They can still report links going TO your domain, but they will not be able to report links going FROM your domain AND since they cannot crawl your site they will not be able to explore interlinking going on nor explore your content.

They still will be able to find your domain and pages ranking within the search results but they'll have to know about those long-tail KGR terms to even query them.

You don't need the SEO world knowing what's going on within your site, so blocking those bots creates another barrier to entry for your competition.

I use the Broken Link Checker to see what Ahrefs has for SERPWoo (I blocked them years ago):

Good.

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Unfortunately BuilderSociety has not done the same:

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Just blocking these spiders gives your competition less information about your site.

TLDR: For Zero funds projects/individuals with zero authority - Order 180 KGR termed articles within your industry, and publish them daily for next 6 months.​

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Using the maths from the tier level of the DAILY GOOGLE ORGANIC traffic you are getting for the MONTHLY search term traffic to go after.​

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Use the KGR terms to boost up your money pages and other important pages.​

Logic tells you that a domain with zero power, zero backlinks, brand new, is never going to rank for a term outside of what Google allows (3,000 a month in our example), just "because". By building the bottom basements you are creating power and gaining Google's trust that it can trust you with more traffic, that's why you start from the very bottom - 0-10 tiers.

Use this technique on mature sites to round off the entity relationships, categorization, and Google's understand of your brand's function. If you are going after a term that's 10,000, but have no supporting pages that prop up that you have knowledge on that term - WHY would Google send you traffic? Especially without Power Boosts?

SEO is not hard, a lot of people just don't have the "starting from scratch" blueprint that's been missing from the realm.

- CCarter

 

[secretagentdad]

Pretty plz, can someone journal thread this soup recipe as a case study.

This is like 900% more effort than I am ever gonna put into anything.

My lizard brain is hyped and wants to see it in action though.

 

[Cash Builder]

This is awesome. I'm definitely going to implement this strategy on one of my sites, just have to decide which one. I have 4 sites that are all somewhere in the bottom 3 tiers, it might be fun to start with the one at the very bottom and see what happens.

 

[MrMedia]

Incredible knowledge bombs.

One question / scenario -

I publish lots of content at my low tier level over a series of weeks. These articles are long tail variations of the main target kw I am going after.

Isn't there an issue of cannibalisation by creating 10 long tail articles vs the one power article that targets the main kw?

How would you best manage this?

 

[Sutra]

Incredible knowledge bombs.

One question / scenario -

I publish lots of content at my low tier level over a series of weeks. These articles are long tail variations of the main target kw I am going after.

Isn't there an issue of cannibalisation by creating 10 long tail articles vs the one power article that targets the main kw?

How would you best manage this?

Regarding cannibalizing the way you mentioned, in the past I found that to be an issue. But nowadays, not really. Initially, similar keyword articles might fight for ranking a bit, but as long as the page is laser focused Google is able to tell the intent and will rank them appropriately, thus no cannibalization.

 

[CCarter]

Isn't there an issue of cannibalisation by creating 10 long tail articles vs the one power article that targets the main kw?

No.

If the long-tail articles were grabbing the KGR terms then you wouldn't need to create the new piece of content, but they are not. We are going after the KGR terms and not necessarily putting in a ton of effort afterwards to those pages.

Who cares if your site has 10,000 pages that each bring you 1 visitor a day each? That's still 10,000 visitors a day to your site. Google sees that it trusts you with 10,000 visitors a day, and you are linking upward, when you publish higher volume terms you'll rank higher.

You have to change your whole mindset to how you approach marketing and SEO - because a lot of what you believe are lies or half-truths.

I'm going to say some things which are controversial but backed by data.

Controversy #1. A single domain can rank multiple times within a keyword's Google search results. Now logic might dictate to some that's not right, but it happens A LOT.

Now if you can't get the #1 spot out of the top 10, why not get multiple spots within the top 10, 20, or 30? Better to fish with nets instead of a single fishing rod.

Controversy #2. A single URL can rank multiple times within a keyword's Google search results WITHOUT either being a part of the feature snippet or special data; straight organic: 1 URL having multiple positions.

No one wants to hear that...

BUT lets use my 2nd favorite person in the world, 1st being me of course; Natalie Dormer - same domains ranking multiples times:

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Same URL ranking multiple times within the same keyword for MONTHS:

The one key difference is the description was different for the 2 positions, but the URL is the same.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/23/hunger-games-mockingjay-natalie-dormer-game-of-thrones

First position:

Second position:

Where are your SEO Gurus now?

How long did this one last? From January 11th to July 22nd, 192 days, that's more than half a year, that's no Google algorithm update anomaly.

The reason I know this is because when you are pulling SERP Data you have to have some sort of key to identify the data, Naturally it makes sense to have the URL as the key since, conventional wisdom suggest a URL cannot appear more than once within the Top 100 results - WRONG.

So in my programming it was $SERP[KEYWORD_ID][DATE][URL] - but within that day the charts were screwy and I made this discovery cause ANOTHER user reported seeing the same within their keywords. The URL can no longer be the key. I had to create a variation so first instance is URL_1, second is URL_2.

It was a ton of programming and mind-bending thought process but it works and now the SERP View can render data correctly.

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So if we know there are instances of the same URL ranking in multiple positions within a keyword's top 100 - with proof; And we know the same domain can rank in multiple positions within a keyword's top 100 - with proof - why then do we care about keyword cannibalization?

The purpose would be to somehow "combine" the pages to make a bigger powerful page. But #1. that more powerful page is not ranking for the KGR term so that's defeating the point; And #2, how do you combine the same URL?

Some might say "well that's rare" - if it was so rare I wouldn't have wasted weeks recoding several interfaces to accommodate it, especially if a number of other users are seeing the same thing. There are a ton crazy stuff I see within the SERPs and others do, Ryan McLaughlin discovered that Google tests CTR by positioning your URL higher for a single day and seeing the reaction:

He wrote a guestpost about it for SERPWoo 5 years ago, we just never published it cause it was too much for the SEO world, he was talking about CTR manipulation and... well... The SEO Deep State casts a wide shadow. The SEO community STILL doesn't believe SEO Domain Age is a factor... Wild (The WHOIS creation date is NOT the first day though, your first day is when you get into Google's index).

Back on topic: As well we are going after KGR terms they in itself are rarely Googled, based on volume. So if we are playing with an outlier plan you can't think like an insider, you have to throw away your whole SEO game-plan.

This technique is about going after a single keyword term and that's that. Don't waste time trying to be smart or get creative, that's where the theory falls apart, cause the next jump is "well why not just go after 100+ volume terms and power boost your way to the top, you are defeating the purpose of the multiple layer moat by trying to think ahead.

 

[MrMedia]

Got it.

Time to start cranking out a boatload of KGR content.

I'm currently at level 0 with the site I showed you @CCarter

So most of the big broad terms are covered with articles on the site but with no basement of KGR content support they will never rank.

I see where you are going with this now.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Pretty plz, can someone journal thread this soup recipe as a case study.

It's pretty much what I'm doing here on The Eternal Grind case study from day one, though I don't dip to zero volume. 300 is about as low as I go.

I've been talking about this approach in my other case study as well, with the added variables of finding out a type of formatting that is different from what your competitors are doing that Google prefers for a type of query. If you can determine that you're qualified for that type of query in the way CCarter is talking, nail the on-page, and crack the code on a special type of post layout, it's go time.

Toss in some links with the right anchors and you can boost up a level too. You tend to decay back down a level and stop getting the million extra related long tails (not that related word-wise to the short tail) that you pick up, but you keep tons of traffic.

I've been doing this with a group of articles. Here's the organic traffic since last July:

This was proof of concept with about 10 posts. I've got another 10 published now (or so, not sure on exact numbers) and have "acquired" some links to them. They should pop within the next month. And I have another 10 or so keywords ready for the next batch. These are all in the same "theme" of keywords and layouts.

That's on an aged and powerful site I've been working on for 5+ years. The new site is performing just as well but at a way lower level and almost cracked the $1,000 a month nut already (site started in November 2019).

 

[DanielS]

I've always been a little bit confused about KGR- we search for terms using the "allintitle:" modifier, and divide the results given by the search volume for the keyword/search term. This makes sense, but if nobody uses the "allintitle" modifier when using Google, how well will the blog post rank for non-allintitle: results? Is the objective of using this modifier simply to see how many blog posts are using the target keyword in their H1, etc?

If I were to write a blog post targeting a keyword with a monthly search volume of 10, and there were 0 "allintitle:" results, and I were to optimize the post as perfect as possible, would this result in a good ranking for non-allintitle: results or would links still be required for a brand new site even if the keyword isn't in a single H1 of an indexed "allintitle" post in Google?

 

[Ryuzaki]

@DanielS, yes, the goal of allintitle searches are to see how many posts are on-page optimized for a search term. If the term isn't in the <title> tag, it's likely not in the <h1> or <h2> either.

Google first and foremost wants to rank content tightly related to the search query. If they can't get that, most of the weight ends up going to link metrics (domain-wide). Typically, on-page is the most powerful, followed by links to the page and then links to the domain. So by finding queries where there's very few on-page optimized pages to serve to the users, You can knock out at least 50% of the battle if not more by targeting the term.

Eventually you get powerful enough where this stops making any meaningful impact to organic traffic or revenue, which is why big sites never go after them and beginner SEO's dodge them too.

"Why would I try to rank for a 30 volume term?" Because when you dominate that 30 volume term, you're going to discover that there's a lot of one-time searches that you fulfill as well as various related long-tails and variations.

If you can reach scale and publish a lot of content regularly at a price that makes sense, doing this can be worth it and build the moat that CCarter is describing. But even with an operation that works at scale, there ends up being better opportunities to tackle.

You'll graduate out of targeting KGR terms eventually, either based on an ROI calculation or by flat out running out of them for the sub-niche. Opening up a new category starts the game over. You may be tempted to dodge these tiny terms, but still tackling them not only builds the moat but it also builds the pyramid of relevancy and interlinking upwards.

At the start of a new site it's absolutely worth targeting KGR-style keywords. Even if you can't find them, you can still target low competition, low volume terms that you know you have a chance of winning. Same concept, same result. Then build upwards to medium volume and high volume, and link upwards.

I prefer to do it the other way around when I'm building in this fashion. I start on the higher volume and higher competition terms and build downwards to a wider base. This starts aging the more competitive posts and lets me interlink upwards as I go, instead of having to go back. It's a small time saver if you're going to have it all written and posted anyways and can delay "getting to the money" for a while.

 

[DanielS]

@DanielS, yes, the goal of allintitle searches are to see how many posts are on-page optimized for a search term. If the term isn't in the <title> tag, it's likely not in the <h1> or <h2> either.

Google first and foremost wants to rank content tightly related to the search query. If they can't get that, most of the weight ends up going to link metrics (domain-wide). Typically, on-page is the most powerful, followed by links to the page and then links to the domain. So by finding queries where there's very few on-page optimized pages to serve to the users, You can knock out at least 50% of the battle if not more by targeting the term.

Eventually you get powerful enough where this stops making any meaningful impact to organic traffic or revenue, which is why big sites never go after them and beginner SEO's dodge them too.

"Why would I try to rank for a 30 volume term?" Because when you dominate that 30 volume term, you're going to discover that there's a lot of one-time searches that you fulfill as well as various related long-tails and variations.

If you can reach scale and publish a lot of content regularly at a price that makes sense, doing this can be worth it and build the moat that CCarter is describing. But even with an operation that works at scale, there ends up being better opportunities to tackle.

You'll graduate out of targeting KGR terms eventually, either based on an ROI calculation or by flat out running out of them for the sub-niche. Opening up a new category starts the game over. You may be tempted to dodge these tiny terms, but still tackling them not only builds the moat but it also builds the pyramid of relevancy and interlinking upwards.

At the start of a new site it's absolutely worth targeting KGR-style keywords. Even if you can't find them, you can still target low competition, low volume terms that you know you have a chance of winning. Same concept, same result. Then build upwards to medium volume and high volume, and link upwards.

I prefer to do it the other way around when I'm building in this fashion. I start on the higher volume and higher competition terms and build downwards to a wider base. This starts aging the more competitive posts and lets me interlink upwards as I go, instead of having to go back. It's a small time saver if you're going to have it all written and posted anyways and can delay "getting to the money" for a while.

Thank you for the explanation!

I guess my follow-up question would be: If someone were to start a brand new website and write 100 high-quality articles targeting KGR terms, would Google rank the website for various KGR terms based off of publishing frequency and on-page SEO alone? Or, would interlinking the 100 articles together where applicable be a positive indicator in the eyes of Google as well?

I guess I just don't understand how the ball gets rolling initially with a new website. Keep in mind, I'm not taking traffic leaking or promotion into account, I'm just wondering how things get started from a 100% organic perspective.

 

[Ryuzaki]

would Google rank the website for various KGR terms based off of publishing frequency and on-page SEO alone? Or, would interlinking the 100 articles together where applicable be a positive indicator in the eyes of Google as well?

I don't think publishing frequency plays that much of a role in Google other than how often they come crawling to find new content. But each indexed page generates a small amount of self-created page rank juice to then distribute to other pages. So it's in your benefit to be interlinking to cycle juice around and get the added benefit of using anchor texts to help Google understand what a page is about. Anchor texts pass relevancy and the links pass the juice. If you're interlinking, the tide of your site will lift all of your pages together.

 

[CCarter]

You always need to interlink all content - each link tells Google this page is somewhat relevant. People that have indexation problems do not have inner links going to the page - YET they are baffled why Google doesn't care about their page. Hmmm...

Perhaps if YOU voted for it by linking to it then Google can say "oh okay, this seems relevant according to the site owner."

Google is looking for the most accurate answer if your site has the content that a user is exactly looking for you will rank. KGR solves this by finding other pages that are super targeting the search term - if it's a weak SERP you can slide in with your zero authority since you are stating verbatim the answer to the question the Google searcher is looking for.

--

To give you guys an anology, let's say you want to get to California from New York. Now the more resources you have, Power Boost, the faster you will get there.

If you got a private jet, powerful backlinks + authority + money to somewhat burn on loud promotion, you'll get there faster.

If you can only afford a commercial airline flight then you'll get there but a a lot slower.

If you can only afford a car or bus, a lot longer.

If you have literally zero resources - you have to walk on foot. You'll get there, but a lot longer.

This method is the walk - cause you have no resources. Eventually as you gain revenue and money through the traffic, you turn the walk into a run, then a bicycle, then a car, then a plane, and eventually one day you might arrive at your destination in your own private jet.

The basics of on-page SEO and getting a site's lights turn on have to be there. You have to know the basics - equivalent of having legs to walk. If you have zero clue then yeah you are are going to crawl there, and hopefully you don't give up before you get there.

SEO Basics:

1. Title tags and H1 tag has target keyword.

2. Images are within the content.

3. Video is better for user experience - not necessary.

4. Your site loads fast on mobile and desktop, pagspeed + decent hosting.

5. Don't have a thousand and one connections from your AD network waterfall fucking up your site's performance.

6. Some outside presences like on social media, web 2.0s or other places where you can show Google that you deserve to be within their index, and I don't mean BLANK Pinterests or spammy looking twitter feed. Put some effort into your brand's online presence outside of your website.

7. Sitemap + robots.txt. Submit to sitemap to Google's search console helps.

8. If you can throw in schema perfect. If you can mention Entities even more perfect.
​

--

There is a bit more that can always be added, but being an online marketer when you go to a site you know what makes a site look legit and what doesn't. Make sure you incorporate those assets into your own brand's presence and you should slide into Google's index without a problem.


Now if you can't muster up any of the above, Google is not going to rank you for a 100 monthly term let alone a 10,000 monthly term cause - frankly no one gives a shit about you or your brand. Google doesn't. And since Google, through Chrome, cannot detect people going to your site or caring, searching your brand's name, WHY would they send you massive amounts of traffic?

You are nobody, so they won't. So start off from scratch, literally walk/crawl to your destination. This is the method for those with nothing and want to get started.

Now with @Ryuzaki, he's got resources and time, so he starts from the top while building the basement, fine. But if you don't have those resources, you'll build a 40,000 or 1,000 monthly term page and kick yourself cause you aren't ranking in 6-12 months while checking and seeing your 0 daily visitors in Google Analytics every hour.

You'll give up.

If you can't rank for terms within the 0.25 KGR ratio that have 0-10, 10-20, 20-50, or 50-100 traffic volumes, literally can't get in the top 30 - you've got serious SEO problems, and have to take some SEO 101 courses.

 

[proto]

@CCarter Will be there any difference if we interlink the post inside a paragraph or just using " here another article you might be interested --> URL"

 

[CCarter]

@CCarter Will be there any difference if we interlink the post inside a paragraph or just using " here another article you might be interested --> URL"

Within paragraphs is always better cause it give Google a bit more context of what's on the other side. You can also so the "Here are other interesting stuff" angle at the bottom of posts as well.

There is no right or wrong answer IMO. Some users will right click and open in the new tab the information and skip around as they read your content. I can barely sit still while reading long format content so I am one of those that skip around and clicking within the paragraphs gives me some distraction I guess.

It's really up to you on this. If you notice I tend to interlink within my paragraphs in my threads as well.

 

[FrankCertain]

@CCarter what word count would you aim for (approx) for each article with such low search volume?

 

[Supermulti]

@CCarter what word count would you aim for (approx) for each article with such low search volume?

Also, just riding off the back of this - do you structure the H2, H3, etc with other similar <0.25 phrases or do you strictly stick to the one in the Title throughout the whole article?

 

[lion1978]

@CCarter what word count would you aim for (approx) for each article with such low search volume?

Now I know that I'm not CCarter, but my answer would be as many or as few as it takes to cover the topic, there is no magic word count number in seo though many like to think so, the primary driving force behind the whole the longer the better mentality is simply that the more words you write the more opportunities you have to input your keywords.
but often at least in my experience seo's forget that the longer the content is the more engaging it needs to be, in order to keep the attention of the user/reader.

 

[bopeep]

Would it make sense to slap cheap fiverr content with the KGR keyword target and later on go about correcting them? I know On page is the main focus, but will quality of content matter? Algorithmically speaking.

 

[lion1978]

Would it make sense to slap cheap fiverr content with the KGR keyword target and later on go about correcting them? I know On page is the main focus, but will quality of content matter? Algorithmically speaking.

Personally I'd do the correcction straight away, better get it done sooner than later plus if you can land a top 10 position with KGR just from the content alone then there is even less to do later, regarding fiverr I would say sure why not, I've never used fiverr content myself so I honestly can't speak of the quality.

Amongst seo's there is an apparently lost secret, or at least something that most missunderstand, Google can't read, well not the way you and I can, all googlebot does is recognize words but it doesn't understand the meaning of theese words the same way a human does, so in a nutshell quality of content doesn't matter for your rankings in it's self, but the quality matters to the visitors and if they find giberish content there aka low quality content they likely will click back to the search results and find another piece of content, and this indicates to googles algo that your content doesn't deserve the to be at the position where it is currently.
So the answer to wether quality matters is a bit complex because it is both no and yes.
if for instance you choose to go black hat and cloak your content aka showing googlebot one thing and redirecting(or in other ways show) visitors another then you'd show googlebot a page with giberish and stuffed with the keyword you'd want to rank for and human visitors you'd send to a conversion optimised page.

I hope this helps and makes just a little sense if not then feel free to reply WTF?????????

 

[bopeep]

Personally I'd do the correcction straight away, better get it done sooner than later plus if you can land a top 10 position with KGR just from the content alone then there is even less to do later, regarding fiverr I would say sure why not, I've never used fiverr content myself so I honestly can't speak of the quality.

Amongst seo's there is an apparently lost secret, or at least something that most missunderstand, Google can't read, well not the way you and I can, all googlebot does is recognize words but it doesn't understand the meaning of theese words the same way a human does, so in a nutshell quality of content doesn't matter for your rankings in it's self, but the quality matters to the visitors and if they find giberish content there aka low quality content they likely will click back to the search results and find another piece of content, and this indicates to googles algo that your content doesn't deserve the to be at the position where it is currently.
So the answer to wether quality matters is a bit complex because it is both no and yes.
if for instance you choose to go black hat and cloak your content aka showing googlebot one thing and redirecting(or in other ways show) visitors another then you'd show googlebot a page with giberish and stuffed with the keyword you'd want to rank for and human visitors you'd send to a conversion optimised page.

I hope this helps and makes just a little sense if not then feel free to reply WTF?????????

Totally makes sense, I was saying it in terms of cranking out lots of content fast.
Anyway I just ordered 30 KGR as a trial from fiverr. Will see how the keywords look like and how I would like to outline the content.

 

[CCarter]

@CCarter what word count would you aim for (approx) for each article with such low search volume?

Controversy #3. I never count words when creating content. I wouldn't be able to tell you the word count of any articles I've published. I just make sure it answers the questions and use "People also asked" as references points to questions and content I should be including.

I think SEOs have gone too far into the "perfect science" of things like measuring ingredients to a recipe for cooking. You are losing the art and more importantly the tone and voice of yourself when you are confining yourself by "word count".

Imagine if I said "For this SEO Avalanche article I'm going to write 2,000 words." That alone starts me out without really thinking about "how will this benefit the end users". Instead I'm stressed about fucking counting words like that's going to give what I write better flavor - it won't. It will create bland and fluff pieces.

Would it make sense to slap cheap fiverr content with the KGR keyword target and later on go about correcting them? I know On page is the main focus, but will quality of content matter? Algorithmically speaking.

Don't put up content that needs to be fixed later on. Do it right the first time cause you are trying to rank IMMEDIATELY within 2-14 days of throwing up the article. So if someone lands in your content that's un-formatted they will bounce and that will screw up the whole point cause Google will see that bounce and think your content is garbage.

First impressions matter, in life and online.

Also, just riding off the back of this - do you structure the H2, H3, etc with other similar <0.25 phrases or do you strictly stick to the one in the Title throughout the whole article?

No, I didn't realize I forgot to mention, you need to put high and medium volume keywords and other key-phrases (with high CPC) you want to rank for within your content. This way you can go back and upward link to the articles that target the higher volume keywords. You should only use the KGR terms for the Title and H1 tag. Afterwards answer the user's question based on the intent.

Add questions from Quora and "People Also Asked" as well as the "Related Keywords" within your content so round it out. That way when you write more critical pieces you can go back to the KGR content and link to the higher up levels. It's what the basement is for, to set the foundation to your skyscraper.

Example a KGR term I'm going after is "How Do I Check A Company's Reputation", search volume is 150 visitors a month, All In Title = 26, making the KGR = 0.17.

Within that content I'm going to throw in ORM (Online Reputation Management) terms and other rank tracking terms that have a lot higher volume. I'm going to inner link the ORM to the ORM page and the rank track to the rank tracker page, and other aspects of my content.

This has an added benefit of getting higher CPC Ads if I was running Adsense cause within the content I'm talking about high volume and high CPC terms. Therefore my Adsense is going to make me more money.

This is one of those things I take for granted that I assume people know. In order to make more money with Adsense you need to have high volume CPC terms within your content as well.

There is a higher level to the SEO Avalanche Technique, when using the KGR, find the keyword within the KGR that has the highest volume or highest CPC, so in my scenario "reputation management" with 5,400, versus "online reputation management" with 2400.

Now I Google "reputation management" and see if I can find any questions within Quora or "People Also Ask" results. From there I can add answers to those questions within this KGR article AS WELL as get ideas for reputation management topics that I can create additional content from. Afterwards when I do create the newer reputation management articles I can go back to this KGR article and upward link to the content.

The added benefits of the KGR content is that it will already be indexed and therefore my newer articles, after I link to it, will get indexed faster and have more PageRank juice to it.

These basement articles are suppose to setup your whole foundation and support your foundation from degradation and enemies trying to take inroads.

Notice that the content around the KGR article is silo-ed, it's the bottom of the silo, so it can inner link upward nicely.

Don't just order content and throw it up, have a game plan on what's your end goal - in my scenario it's to rank SERPWoo for online reputation management software and tools.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Regarding these questions about content length and quality, let me say this...

The idea of sniping out one keyword like in the old days isn't how Google works any more. You can still approach it like that, and sometimes that's all you need to do.

But you're best bet is to cover the topic of the search term you're going after, in full. By in full I mean in depth and in breadth. In my original KGR thread there's examples like "how to brew beer at home." Do you really think you can cover that topic in 500 words? 1000 words?

You might be able to rank for these KGR terms like that due to lack of competition, but how long will that last? Because someone like me is going to come around and publish a 2500 word tutorial full of pictures and steps and schema markup and everything and do the "full takeover" as I like to call it.

The "full takeover" is when you so fully dominate the main keyword that you rank for every single related keyword, long-tails, and eventually shorter tails too. And that's where the money is at in organic traffic these days. Not in sniping one keyword but in sniping the entire basket of keywords. I've talked about this a lot on the forum to the point where I went ahead and added it to the On-Page Day of the Crash Course.

That's part of the attraction of KGR keywords. They're a way to sneak up the SERPs for a single keyword, but that ends up leading to trust from Google for the article which ends up getting blessed for a lot more keywords. So even though the volume may only be 100 searches per month, which would lead to maybe 50 visits a month, you'll find these articles often start getting 1000 visits a month or more even (if you put in the effort on the content). That's the power of topical optimization.

And no, I'm not a fan of putting up junk content at first, though I understand the rationale. It's not just about Google, but about the visitors, and their on-site metrics get fed back to Google in certain ways that can stifle your progress. @JamaicanMoose starts with cheaper content and does well and maybe he'll have the time to explain his rationale on doing it that way.

I suspect the difference between the opinions and people with the opinions is some of us are doing pure SEO plays and don't care about the branding that much, and others of us are building brands and taking more care of the broader picture. One leads to faster money, one leads to bigger money eventually. Whatever floats your boat is probably the best way to approach it.

 

[Postmortis]

Which of the following searches in Google are you guys using to get the KGR score?

allintitle:keyword golden ratio
vs.
broad - allintitle:keyword golden ratio
vs.
phrase - allintitle:"keyword golden ratio"

@Ryuzaki asked this back in 2017 in the linked KGR thread but was wondering if anything has changed since.

 

[bopeep]

What do you think of local directories as a moat to build relevancy of parent page . EG I have a dental hygiene Info page. Now I am not trying to generate leads for local dentists, but what If I made a dentalhygeine.com/dir/dentists-tallahassee and I make thousands of pages with google maps, review fro yelp (as image), etc.. Will make the content semi unique with more fluff as I have some experience making DB sites, but my point is will it somehow affect the site negatively, and if yes why, and what to avoid if I want to implement it right. Will it trigger thin content penalty?